Jonathan Sanderson and I are in Bristol working for Walking With Robots running a New Media workshop. Please visit the blog and make comments, ask questions. If you want to know more about the workshop or a particular story, ask…

We are (hopefully) teaching roboticists and AI researchers how to use the web and the media in general and also how to recognise what makes a ‘story’ which will interest the press. The reasons why people might want to do this are varied- some because they want their project to get more publicity, which in turn might help them to raise funds or investment; others might want to use the media for public understanding of science reasons to help engage the public in their research or inspire young people to take up science; some might just want to be in the public eye!

We’ve got them finding stories at the rest of the workshop then writing them up as frantically as possible – one story an hour at the moment – in order to get them to try and recognise what makes a ‘story’ and also to get them to understand how to construct a story. This will help them to write press releases and pitch stories to science correspondents in the future or, indeed, even if they want to write stories for their own University’s publications.

If you want to have a look at how they are doing you can visit their blog Walking With Robots. At the very least, just leave a little comment in order to let them know that what they are doing is being seen by ‘the world’.